How Smart Transloading Can Save You Money & Improve Steel Logistics

When moving steel bar, rod, or wire by road, it’s easy to hit the 48,000-pound weight limit on a flatbed trailer, meaning that a large order can easily need multiple trucks and drivers. Moving steel by rail avoids weight limits and is much less expensive (per pound and per mile) than trucking. The downside is that very few suppliers have ready access to a rail yard.

King Steel is different. Our Holly, Michigan, location features a 100,000-square-foot rail yard, allowing us to receive steel by rail and transload it via trucks for delivery to our customers.

Our transloading capabilities provide many benefits to new and existing King Steel customers, including lower costs and wait times, better supply chain visibility, improved customer satisfaction, and better inventory management.

Reduces Transportation & Inventory Holding Costs

A single railcar can carry as much steel as four or more trucks and is generally more fuel-efficient, in terms of pounds moved, than trucks. Transloading also allows us to consolidate freight movements, which reduces the administrative burden.

Together, these factors make rail far more cost-effective than trucks. This means substantial cost savings when we bring steel to our Holly, MI, location by rail, and those lower transportation costs get passed on to our customers.

Transloading also means we can store product before we need to ship it out. Knowing inventory is close at hand can help customers reduce what they keep in stock, saving both money and space.

Minimizes Wait Times for Railcars

Trains are constrained by where the tracks run and, on some routes, by bottlenecks in the track system. Our transloading service provides a buffer that protects against delays, so there’s never a delay waiting for a railcar to arrive. Where railcars can’t run, our trucks will get there.

Improves Supply Chain Visibility

A concern for many steel buyers is whether their delivery will arrive on time. Transloading provides a checkpoint where quantities are logged and reported, enabling updated delivery estimates.

At the same time, transloading provides an opportunity for additional value-adding services, including performing inspections to verify quantities and specifications, labeling or re-labeling, and even repackaging into more convenient formats.

Better Mill-to-Customer Coordination

Steel mills don’t produce bar, wire, or rod at the rates and frequencies most end-users want to consume it. This can force businesses to hold more than they want simply to reduce the risk of shortages. As transloading involves breaking larger shipments into smaller batches, it offers a way of smoothing uneven production and giving customers the ability to synchronize production schedules with transportation availability.

Enhances Just-in-Time Delivery Capabilities

Steel storage is expensive and requires space, but it also provides a buffer against supply chain disruption. Transloading and the related improvements in mill-to-customer coordination open the door to JIT deliveries.

Transloading rail shipments onto trucks, especially when done relatively close to where the steel is needed, means customers can take advantage of JIT deliveries, which in turn reduces in-house inventory levels and frees up space.

Learn More About King Steel’s Transloading Capabilities

Since our founding, King Steel has been committed to offering the highest levels of service and quality at a competitive price to our North American customers. Our new steel logistics services, including transloading, further increase the value we can provide to our customers.

Contact us today to learn more about our logistics services and transloading capabilities or to start your delivery program with King Steel.